alt Hacker NewsReading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
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The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.
Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."
In what way were the sentences content heavy? It's quite repetitive, and often the meaning of a section of it will be split into individual fragments.
I get it.
One sentence pragraphs feel punchy.
It feels like you're writing copy for an Apple ad.
..but it only works when it's in another medium, in a shorter format. In this form, it's just exhausting.
> Reflect on the structure of your own comment
Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?
> "my attention span is shot"
Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.
A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions. If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.
PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).